VB2017 preview: State of cybersecurity in Africa: Kenya

Posted by Martijn Grooten on Sep 4, 2017

The Internet is very much a global phenomenon, and for that reason, so is cybersecurity. A remote code execution vulnerability is as much of a problem on a server in Afghanistan as it is on one in Zimbabwe.

Yet threats do vary between countries and regions, and in order to get a complete picture of the threat landscape, it is important to understand what is happening even in less prominent regions. For this reason, we are very excited to have Tyrus Kamau, a security consultant for Euclid Security in Nairobi, Kenya and founder of the AfricaHackOn conference, come to VB2017 in Madrid to speak about the state of security in Kenya.

Kenya is among the leading countries in Africa in terms of technology uptake, and not surprisingly, it faces a range of security threats, from ordinary financial fraud to global APT attacks by the likes of the Lazarus and Equation Groups. The wide usage of mobile money in the country has not escaped the eyes of cybercriminals either, and they are exploiting the weak security controls around mobile platforms to steal money.

Thousands of websites, including many sites of government organisations in the UK, the US and Sweden, were recently found to have been serving a cryptocurrency miner. More interesting than the incident itself, though, are the lessons that can be…

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